Fantastical Reality

Ever since I was young, I have always been prone to flights of fancy. In novels, in hand-drawn animations, I sought an escape from humdrum reality, a way to transport myself someplace better. I still do to this day. These exit strategies, as all good escapists will know, are not limited to the conventional modes of art and fiction. One can escape by way of a succulent plate of green D’Anjou pears drizzled with wildflower honey, by the sight of a blue-point Birman kitten curled into the shape of a fresh baked brioche, anything that can incite a sense of joy, a fantasy that can spark your mind on a far-flung journey.

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It’s the sensation I get when I see the ethereal work of Simone Rocha, the Irish designer who has spent the last 14 years crafting a singular world of subversive femininity, as it is so often described. Each creation is designed to be devoured, a sumptuous feast for famished senses. Tiers of tulle and lace, sculpted around the body, embellished with pearls and colorful glass beads. Trailing ribbons and a pearl handbag shaped like an egg or a two-tiered wedding cake, the arcs of frosting done up in pearls like a Surrealist objet d’art. As for her shows, a Simone Rocha runway is sheer spectacle, akin to a theatrical work or a Dutch Golden Age oil painting come to life.

When I speak to Rocha, 38, in late August in London, she is knee-deep in preparations for her Spring/Summer 2025 show, which was to debut in a few weeks. “This is my favorite time over the year,” she says, seated at her desk between appointments. “This is the best bit. I’m in show prep, which is actually the fun part. It’s like doing all the prep up to shooting a film.”

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Rocha is wearing all black, her hair pulled into a loose knot on her head, embellished with one of her own barrettes. On the metal shelves behind her are rows of books, providing a glimpse into her worldview: a Hauser & Wirth release on the post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, and a retrospective tome on Richard Avedon, containing photographs from 1946 to 2004. Despite the relentless schedule of fittings and meetings and interviews on the docket, the designer looks as sharp as ever, perhaps due to her morning swim through the cool waters of the reservoir near her home, or the prospect of the acupuncture session she’s booked for the evening.

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It’s been almost a decade and a half since Rocha showed her first collection as a graduate of Central Saint Martins. While many promising students tend to flare up and flicker out in the span of a few years, she has remained on top of her game, her design language inspiring the same transcendent feelings no matter how much time has passed. “Over the last decade or so, I’ve always designed from quite an emotional place and a storytelling place, and I’ve always kind of built these narratives in the collection,” the designer explains. “At the core of it has been femininity and the many guises of that. It has to always feel visceral and physical and emotional.”

Last year, Rocha’s work culminated in a triptych of shows, beginning with her Spring/Summer 2024 collection titled The Dress Rehearsal (a “pretend play on bridal”); followed by her highly anticipated haute couture show for Jean Paul Gaultier, The Procession, that same season; and then culminating in Fall/Winter 2024 with The Wake. As a whole, the trio made for a stunning feat of narrative and visual cohesion that unraveled like a three-act play, replete with confections like a pistachio babydoll dress with a lick of ballet-pink tulle, embellished with ribbons that resemble icing on a cake, and aluminum roses from a bridesmaid’s bouquet, their stems turned into the boning of a Gaultier corset. Imbibed as a whole, Rocha’s triptych transcended mere clothing and became an exploratory journey imbued with raw emotion, navigating the highs and lows of human experience.

“Femininity doesn’t have to be soft and supple; it can also be provocative and playful or hurtful.”
— Simone Rocha

After last season’s darker exploration of Queen Victoria’s mourning attire, Rocha is in the mood for lightness for Spring/Summer 2025. “I was feeling much more playful and provocative, slightly frivolous, and a little bit less morose,” she says. “It’s so playful, it’s almost poking fun.” Citing the iconoclastic Scottish dancer Michael Clark and the legendary German choreographer Pina Bausch, the designer has dreamt up tulle tutus worn with embellished over-the-knee socks or ballet slippers, and leotards printed with ghoulish portraits by Irish artist Genieve Figgis. There are cardigans and bloomers, cut from a tinselly knit and clutched to the body, and a string of diaphanous dresses that fluttered down the runway, including a striking scar- let number that evokes Bausch’s iconic take on The Rite of Spring. Pale pink carnations recur throughout the collection, a nod to Nelken (Carnations), which Bausch premiered in 1982. Rocha hopes the results are just as thought-provoking as any “play or a dance with a beginning, middle, and end.”

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One can sense the influence of inspirations like the artist Louise Bourgeois and designers Alexander McQueen and Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, whose garments and shows retained the same elements of a delightfully twisted fantasy, the kind I can’t resist indulging time and again. Yet what makes Rocha’s work so potent, eclipsing more conventionally romantic escapes, is the underlying thread of realism that can be dark and ugly yet beautiful.

“I’ve always felt it’s important not to be in a glass box and to be in touch with reality in some shape or form,” the designer says. “For me, it’s the juxtaposition that is stimulating—whether it’s across a fabrication and you’re looking at something very organic, like a natural cotton, colliding with something man-made, like a fabric that has actually been coated so that it feels like a plastic—that tension and collision is something that’s really important to me. It’s the same with femininity. With romance, there often comes the macabre... It’s about grounding it in realism. Femininity doesn’t have to be soft and supple; it can also be provocative and playful or hurtful.”

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In other words, Rocha’s romanticism isn’t about retreating into fantasy, but using the dreamscape to reimagine and reshape the contours of the world. It is these elements of the grotesque, the macabre, the real that give Simone Rocha roots, making our fleeting escape a more profound exercise. It is a journey that brings you there and back—to where you began, a more thoughtful person than when you left.